Both the Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet are opening their 2021/22 seasons with the same ballet - Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. Jann Parry takes a look at how one of the most admired narrative ballets of the 20th century came to be and details of the many dancing debuts we can look forward to...
Tag - Stuttgart Ballet
★★★★✰ Program 3 features all-British choreographers: Peter Wright, Peter Darrell, Christopher Wheeldon, Matthew Bourne and Kenneth MacMillan. The exception is a solo by American Dominic Walsh, created for his own contemporary dance company. ...Some of the selections are probably unfamiliar to American audiences, as well as to British ballet fans of a younger vintage.
★★★★★ One of many striking things about Marcia Haydée’s production of The Sleeping Beauty is that although it premiered on 10 May 1987, it still looks fresh and current and could have been created within the last couple of years.
★★★★✰ The recording reveals how unusual the choreography is, as it was in 1965... Dancers in pointe shoes have to adapt to flexed feet, flat-footed parallel positions, torsos bent forward, elbows and wrists held at angles.
Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling in new Jürgen Rose designs - "I am not reviewing the recording so much as commenting on the differences between Stuttgart Ballet's 2019 production and the Royal Ballet's version that dates back to the ballet's premiere in 1978..."
★★★✰✰ The twelve dancers are a mix of nationalities, attractive, lively and energetic, fortunately possessing the stamina required to get through a demanding programme.
★★✰✰✰ The show at Wilton's Music Hall, produced and directed by former ballerina Viviana Durante, was originally billed as The Seven Deadly Sins by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht...
A busy time for Morgann Runacre-Temple with work for Scottish Ballet's Digital Season, Stuttgart Ballet's Noverre Young Choreographers Evening, English National Ballet and also her recent Northern Ballet commission will be touring again. She stops to answer 5 questions...
★★★✰✰ A strikingly beautiful ballerina, with a lissome body and expressive features, EunWon Lee is an ideal Juliet...
★★★★✰ Maillot’s work is generally replete with a sense of irony and eroticism and Shakespeare gave him enormous scope for both!
★★✰✰✰ In truth Polunin's latest show at the London Coliseum, although it has its moments, isn't such a great advertisement for him as a dancer or as a creative mixer of the ballet pot.
★★★★✰ Gloria was Nixon’s first choice because he felt it showed MacMillan at his moving best. It contrasts Poulenc’s choral setting of the Latin text from the mass in praise of God with the toll of human lives in the First World War.
★★★✰✰ It is the melodrama that people remember and are drawn to in Onegin. But his kind of melodrama isn’t everyone’s cup of tea...
★★★✰✰ Elisa Badenes and Cesar Corrales delivered a good professional show, if it was not the runaway success I had perhaps hoped for.
★★★✰✰ The most interesting item of the programme was definitely the revival of Roland Petit’s L’Arlésienne, created in 1974 when he was director of the National Ballet of Marseille.
His is an insider’s account, complete with waspish comments and cameos of the famous people he encountered...
★★✰✰✰ So bravo for Danilian. All the dancing at the gala was very fine – who could expect any less from these dancers? One can (and should) question his taste but it’s clear that he’s willing to go out on a limb...
★★★✰✰ NIJINSKI neatly lassos this altogether using Goecke’s avant garde movement style ...to give the Stuttgart audience an abstract impression of Nijinsky’s life and contribution to Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.
★★✰✰✰ Like all galas, this was quite a mixed bag. Over 200 students trooped on and offstage in a veritable tornado of activity before the veteran YAGP dancers stepped out for the showstopping stuff...
While other Cherkaoui collaborations have generally crossed boundaries to link contemporary movement with the borrowed style, in Genesis there appears to be a multiplicity of influences.